An IT industry insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

March 13, 2013

But there's a new (and interesting) perspective: when you go through all this transformation stuff, how does IT function appear to the average knowledge worker in a large organization?

I'll give you a hint, and it's very familiar.

We all know how to buy and use technology in our personal lives, why should our corporate lives be any different? Sellers of consumer tech strive to create great online retail experiences, why wouldn't we import that idea into the enterprise IT world?

We have an excellent example of this concept within EMC itself: our own "InfinIT"-branded one-stop shop for most of your day-to-day end-user IT needs. It's slick, well-marketed and very representational of what happens when IT re-orients around making IT easy to consume vs. easy for the IT organization.

Perhaps you've done better in your own IT group, and -- if you have -- congratulations! For everyone else, the tour might be very interesting indeed.

January 15, 2013

It was certainly a big deal many decades ago: the notion that one of your desktop drives ("H:\") could actually be shared with your co-workers over a LAN. No more floppies. A shared repository, usually up-to-date. A huge productivity leap forward, back in the day.

Over time, shared drives became file shares, and repositories, and content-oriented collaboration was layered on top, and then -- the world changed.

We all went mobile. Not just on one device, but often several.

We wanted personal control of who we share with, and under what terms.

We craved simplicity: we want our files are kept up-to-date automatically with nothing for us to do other than get on a network once in a while.

Our circles got larger: not everyone we worked with was a badged employee, and they certainly didn't have access to the corporate network.

But IT still had that responsibility to be in control: what data, where it lives -- and who can see it.

Today, the Syncplicty group at EMC announced that their impressive sync-and-share cloud app can use on-premise IT-owned storage -- in effect, creating a private cloud for next-gen file sharing.

June 25, 2012

Just about every aspect of enterprise IT is in play these days, if you think about it.

One of the more challenging aspects is fully embracing the new endpoint for IT service consumption -- the ubiquitous mobile device.

To be clear, we're not simply talking about a BYOD (bring your own device) program, or re-hosting legacy apps on mobile devices via VDI -- although those are pieces of the bigger picture.

No, what we're really talking a fundamental re-thinking about how application experiences are built, distributed and consumed. Mobile first, if you prefer.

And whether that new capability is pointed at your employees, your partners or your customers -- the changes are turning out to be very far reaching indeed.

EMC's own IT group is no stranger to these forces. For the last few quarters, a small team has been working towards enabling mobility across our entire organization and business model. I first introduced this story back in January of this year.

Now, five months later, I thought it would be good to circle back with the EMC IT team and get a status report: what have we done, and what have we learned?